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Was There an Alternative? Trotskyism: A Look Back Through the Years
This is the first in a seven-volume series by the Russian Marxist historian, Vadim Rogovin, on the history of the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1940. Rogovin traces the complex inner-party struggles of 1923–1927, analyzing contemporaneous official documents, speeches and articles, Soviet archival material, memoirs of participants in political life, and documents by members of the Left Opposition that were suppressed in the Soviet Union for many decades.
This richly illustrated volume includes an appendix of biographies of many oppositionists who were erased from official Soviet history.
This first volume raises the “Was There an Alternative to Stalinism?” It studies the rise of the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky in 1923, and ends with the expulsion of Trotsky and his supporters at the Fifteenth Party Congress in 1927. The succeeding volumes examine the history of the resistance to Stalinism up through Trotsky’s assassination in August 1940 and
the outbreak of World War II.
This richly illustrated volume includes an appendix of biographies of many oppositionists who were erased from official Soviet history.
This first volume raises the “Was There an Alternative to Stalinism?” It studies the rise of the Left Opposition led by Leon Trotsky in 1923, and ends with the expulsion of Trotsky and his supporters at the Fifteenth Party Congress in 1927. The succeeding volumes examine the history of the resistance to Stalinism up through Trotsky’s assassination in August 1940 and
the outbreak of World War II.
717 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 23, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 10, 2023
An essential compliment to the primary existing accounts of this period, such as by Isaac Deutscher, and earlier by Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova. Rogovin’s diligence, benefiting from a wide range of source materials, builds upon their work in a way that is not just politically but intellectually superior to more contemporaneous historical accounts and biographical works of central figures in this story.
Such books generally lack the breadth and depth offered by Rogovin on the complex and contradictory processes of the Soviet 1920s.
While subscribing to the general Trotskyist narrative of the degeneration of Bolshevism in power and the transformation into its opposite, Rogovin is braver than the average Trotskyist narrative of this time in giving voice and due to members of Bolshevik oppositions prior to the Left and United Opposition. They had a clearer grasp of the extent and nature of bureaucratic degeneration and its political consequences some time before Trotsky and others who formed the Left Opposition did, despite the latter being no intellectual or political slouches themselves.
Rogovin, while certainly admiring, offers no pandering portrait, highlighting Trotsky’s fumbling, half-measures, bureaucratic ‘rotten compromises’, and limited criticisms when a more fully articulated opposition that appealed to the party ranks (and crucially, outside the party) was called for, and eventually was formed. Very refreshing, compared to the hagiographical dross offered up by some of the Trotskyist press regarding the 1920s political battle.
Not narrowly limited to political or theoretical debates and organisational manoeuvring - although that certainly takes up a great portion of the text - culture and economics are examined, as is the degradation of how the national question was being handled; particularly noted by Christian Rakovsky and Mykola Skrypnyk with respect to Ukraine and its status.
One will read about underhanded moves in the Comintern that culminated in organised reprisals against the leadership of the Polish Communist Party in 1924, after their criticisms of the Executive Committee of the Communist International’s policy and strategy around the united front, which the Polish Communists considered sectarian. At the Fifth Congress of the Communist International, pressured by Comintern chairman Zinoviev (‘we will break your bones if you try to speak out against us’ - this was still more of a metaphor than an actual threat of violence, though its intention is clear) and insisted upon by his then ally Stalin, the Polish Communist delegation was made to re-elect the bureau of their own Central Committee. A serious intervention into its own internal affairs, such delegates were not authorised to do such a thing, and yet, it was done, depriving the Polish Communist Party of critical leaders who while respecting the Comintern’s authority, had no intention of closing their mouths or dulling the blade of their criticisms if they felt a wrong policy or strategy was being pursued.
Rogovin endlessly accumulates such details to establish the degenerative process that was occurring - and just as importantly the resistance to it, whether of greater or lesser intensity - which was not only internal to the Soviet Union but was then reflected in the international communist movement.
There are a few ironies in the narrative, as anarchists and others on the left are surely to note; as part of crushing the Opposition, at the Fifteenth Congress of the Communist Party in 1927 a demagogic manoeuvre was employed, whereby a delegate from ‘the red metal-workers of Stalingrad’ presented a steel broom to the congress, and declared the utility of sweeping the Opposition away ‘with this unforgiving broom’, to general applause. Alexi Rykov, chairman of the meeting, then took the broom and stated, to stormy applause: ‘I give this broom to Comrade Stalin, let him use it to sweep away our enemies.’
Trotsky had once spoken about how anarchism had been cleansed from Soviet lands ‘with an iron broom’, with particular reference to the Makhnovists.
Now that iron broom, transformed into steel, which he had done so much to forge, swept him out of the Soviet Union, and his compatriots into internal exile, prisons and concentration camps. Indeed it would sweep Rykov himself away not all that long after he had ‘given’ it to Stalin.
Any debate on the Soviet 1920s in left-wing circles without reference to this book will be all the more impoverished for it. Thankfully it is well written, albeit occasionally the language does slide into the polemical, i.e. against Stalin. Fair enough given the subject and the openly acknowledged politics of the author, but a fuller picture of Stalin’s personality and development requires consulting other texts, of which the best is Ronald Grigor Suny’s Stalin biography.
Such books generally lack the breadth and depth offered by Rogovin on the complex and contradictory processes of the Soviet 1920s.
While subscribing to the general Trotskyist narrative of the degeneration of Bolshevism in power and the transformation into its opposite, Rogovin is braver than the average Trotskyist narrative of this time in giving voice and due to members of Bolshevik oppositions prior to the Left and United Opposition. They had a clearer grasp of the extent and nature of bureaucratic degeneration and its political consequences some time before Trotsky and others who formed the Left Opposition did, despite the latter being no intellectual or political slouches themselves.
Rogovin, while certainly admiring, offers no pandering portrait, highlighting Trotsky’s fumbling, half-measures, bureaucratic ‘rotten compromises’, and limited criticisms when a more fully articulated opposition that appealed to the party ranks (and crucially, outside the party) was called for, and eventually was formed. Very refreshing, compared to the hagiographical dross offered up by some of the Trotskyist press regarding the 1920s political battle.
Not narrowly limited to political or theoretical debates and organisational manoeuvring - although that certainly takes up a great portion of the text - culture and economics are examined, as is the degradation of how the national question was being handled; particularly noted by Christian Rakovsky and Mykola Skrypnyk with respect to Ukraine and its status.
One will read about underhanded moves in the Comintern that culminated in organised reprisals against the leadership of the Polish Communist Party in 1924, after their criticisms of the Executive Committee of the Communist International’s policy and strategy around the united front, which the Polish Communists considered sectarian. At the Fifth Congress of the Communist International, pressured by Comintern chairman Zinoviev (‘we will break your bones if you try to speak out against us’ - this was still more of a metaphor than an actual threat of violence, though its intention is clear) and insisted upon by his then ally Stalin, the Polish Communist delegation was made to re-elect the bureau of their own Central Committee. A serious intervention into its own internal affairs, such delegates were not authorised to do such a thing, and yet, it was done, depriving the Polish Communist Party of critical leaders who while respecting the Comintern’s authority, had no intention of closing their mouths or dulling the blade of their criticisms if they felt a wrong policy or strategy was being pursued.
Rogovin endlessly accumulates such details to establish the degenerative process that was occurring - and just as importantly the resistance to it, whether of greater or lesser intensity - which was not only internal to the Soviet Union but was then reflected in the international communist movement.
There are a few ironies in the narrative, as anarchists and others on the left are surely to note; as part of crushing the Opposition, at the Fifteenth Congress of the Communist Party in 1927 a demagogic manoeuvre was employed, whereby a delegate from ‘the red metal-workers of Stalingrad’ presented a steel broom to the congress, and declared the utility of sweeping the Opposition away ‘with this unforgiving broom’, to general applause. Alexi Rykov, chairman of the meeting, then took the broom and stated, to stormy applause: ‘I give this broom to Comrade Stalin, let him use it to sweep away our enemies.’
Trotsky had once spoken about how anarchism had been cleansed from Soviet lands ‘with an iron broom’, with particular reference to the Makhnovists.
Now that iron broom, transformed into steel, which he had done so much to forge, swept him out of the Soviet Union, and his compatriots into internal exile, prisons and concentration camps. Indeed it would sweep Rykov himself away not all that long after he had ‘given’ it to Stalin.
Any debate on the Soviet 1920s in left-wing circles without reference to this book will be all the more impoverished for it. Thankfully it is well written, albeit occasionally the language does slide into the polemical, i.e. against Stalin. Fair enough given the subject and the openly acknowledged politics of the author, but a fuller picture of Stalin’s personality and development requires consulting other texts, of which the best is Ronald Grigor Suny’s Stalin biography.
September 26, 2024
A good book for the period 1923-1927 in the Soviet Union. A must read for anyone who thinks the Soviet Union was the same from 1917-1991. There were a lot of fractional struggles, offensives of the bureaucratic caste, and so on. The SU before and after Stalin are two very different places. Rogovin explains how Stalin was able to get on top, in favour of the bureaucracy, and against the true revolutionaries like Trotsky.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews